Bose-Hubbard ground state: Extended Bogoliubov and variational methods compared with time-evolving block decimation

Abstract

We determine the ground-state properties of a gas of interacting bosonic atoms in a one-dimensional optical lattice. The system is modeled by the Bose-Hubbard Hamiltonian. We show how to apply the time-evolving block decimation method to systems with periodic boundary conditions and employ it as a reference to find the ground state of the Bose-Hubbard model. Results are compared with recently proposed approximate methods, such as Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) theories generalized for strong interactions and the variational Bijl-Dingle-Jastrow method. We find that all HFB methods do not bring any improvement to the Bogoliubov theory and therefore provide correct results only in the weakly interacting limit, where the system is deeply in the superfluid regime. On the other hand, the variational Bijl-Dingle-Jastrow method is applicable for much stronger interactions but is essentially limited to the superfluid regime as it reproduces the superfluid--Mott-insulator transition only qualitatively.